by Karen Frazier, Managing Editor
Paranormal Underground Magazine

I’ve been taking a little bit of a blogging break this week. It’s been a busy week. Next week promises to be even busier, but I’m looking for a few moments of breathing space to sit down and write a blog or two.

It’s been a week filled with drama. My drama? Nope. Other people’s. Unfortunately, those other people have insisted that my life make room for their drama. As a result, I’ve sort of backed off. I’ve unplugged. It’s been a good thing, and it has me waxing nostalgic for the “old days” when we were constantly unplugged.

If you are under the age of 30, you’ll probably have nearly zero clue of what I am talking about, but there was once a time when, if we were away from the house and didn’t leave a number telling people where we’d be, nobody could get in touch with us. No cell phones. No texts. No email on the go. No Internet where people could hide behind computer screens and say the absolute meanest thing possible that they wouldn’t dare to say to the face of others.

“How did you survive?” my teen-aged son asks me.

I shrug and say that we got by, but what I really want to tell him is that it was bliss. Vacations were vacations – your boss had no way to reach you. Work stayed at work. Friendships were face to face. When you look in the eyes of another as you speak, it’s difficult to be as cruel as people can be online. Television only had a few channels, so if there wasn’t anything on, then we did other stuff. Read books. Went outside. Spent time as a family.

Don’t get me wrong. Technology has brought a lot of wonderful things to life. After all – we have a world of information at our fingertips, and we can be in near constant communication with our children when they are out of our protective care. Communities have sprung up based on common interest. Connections have been made. Clearly, I use technology to my advantage, as most of us do.

There’s a way to balance it, I’m sure. I remembered that this past week. I can choose to unplug when it all gets to be too much. I don’t have to answer phones. I don’t have to read texts. I can use caller ID to my advantage. I can push the off button on my computer. For the times that I’ve been disconnected, it’s been bliss. There’s been nothing that has come on my cell phone or my computer that needed to be handled right away. And I’m thinking that periods of disconnection may be in my future as a means of not only survival, but also as a way to rediscover the peaceful world in which I sometimes forget to live.

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